


through the storm-wrought night

by That_Ghost_Kristoff



Series: into the desert [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Actual Swears, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Angst, Gen, Graphic Description, Introspection, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, POV Obi-Wan Kenobi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29221926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/That_Ghost_Kristoff/pseuds/That_Ghost_Kristoff
Summary: Obi-Wan and Anakin cope with the brutality of war, inclement weather, and stilted conversations one night on Mimban.Direct sequel tothey walked into the desert.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Series: into the desert [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2135958
Comments: 12
Kudos: 212





	through the storm-wrought night

**Author's Note:**

> The imagery in this is a graphic depiction of the natural world/a slightly less graphic depiction of war. Most of the nature I made up to fill in the gaps, but some does come from the Star Wars canon. It's really not a happy story.
> 
> My series co-author and I decided kriff just didn't have the same emphasis as fuck, so whatever, you know?

At thirty-five, Obi-Wan Kenobi hides out in a waterlogged trench with a burn scorching down his leg and exhaustion hollowing out his bones. Anakin slumps low across from him, his breathing rough and body pressed into the wall, mud slushing into his hair. They both sit stretched out, their legs touching at the knees. Obi-Wan tips his head back against the seeping wall of the ditch, instinctively searching for a peek of the sky through the marshland’s mists. Far above the gangly white hive trees that drape overhead, lightning cracks across the green-black clouds and thunder growls in response. It’s too _wet_ on Mimban, he thinks. All this atmospheric moisture must be turning to water in their lungs—soon, he thinks, the duckweed clogging the groundwater will grow inside them, too.

Anakin is coping badly. Ten years away from Tatooine hasn’t done much for his body’s response to a high relative humidity level.

They’re alone, because an ambush separated them from their unit and the storm disrupted their commlink transmissions. Four troopers from Master Tik’s Mud Jumpers were with them, but only long enough for a pack of droideka snipers to kill them. After, when Anakin said, half-hysterical, “We didn’t even know their names,” Obi-Wan couldn’t muster up any decent advice on releasing his stress into the Force. One fell into the shallow gully with them already dead. His armor came apart at his waist and cracked along his torso, so he discharges blood and viscera into the stagnant water. 

Today isn’t the sort of day for offering advice on how to dispel intense emotions. Obi-Wan hasn’t been doing that well himself for weeks. Not since Geonosis. Not since he went from a peacekeeper to a general. At least, he _thought_ he was managing until eleven days ago, when he discovered that his perception of the last ten years is a lie.

Anakin’s barely spoken to him since they left Tatooine.

Now they’re alone in a swamp, alone on a storm-wrought night in a waterlogged trench overhung with slender white trees speckled with ovoid black ridges that gaze down at them—at him—with a startling sentient sense of accusation. How dare you intruders be here, say the trees, and, What have _you_ done? A howling gust rubs their pale branches together, so the wood creaks and scrapes and the gossamer Mimban moss hanging from the bark sways, releasing faintly glowing spores into the wind. Anakin’s head jerks up to watch. When they touch on the duckweed surrounding the trooper, the pond scum flares a brief, electric malachite before fading again to dull, floral green.

Together, Obi-Wan and Anakin wait out the storm-wrought night in a waterlogged trench. There are too many nocturnal predators with a love for even human-sized prey for them to risk a jaunt through the swamp until daybreak. Lightning strikes, though the shape of it is barely visible through the fog and overcast, and thunder answers. Anakin is quiet, so Obi-Wan is quiet. Anakin’s been too quiet for eleven days. For eleven days, Obi-Wan hasn’t known what to say. 

Ten days ago, he told the Council where the money went on Tatooine, and that for ten years, a boy in their charge thought they owned him. He told them the truth of it, more or less, so Master Yoda just said, “A mistake we have made, but know that Master Qui-Gon did not explain this to him we did not,” and Master Windu said, “Skywalker can be unpredictable if surprised—we should monitor his behaviour in the coming weeks.” 

Master Mundi asked how Obi-Wan was not _made aware_ of this earlier.

Master Billaba asked how Obi-Wan intended to handle the _situation_.

Master Tiin asked how they managed to spend _that_ many credits, as though he expected Obi-Wan would negotiate a price for Anakin’s personhood. The question implied that Anakin _did_ have a price. It implied that Obi-Wan overpaid.

Across the trench, Anakin hacks into his elbow. The mud’s inked over the gold in his curls, leaving them a drab brown. When he was nine, before they even left Naboo, they had to crop his hair close to get rid of the sand mites. In the last few months, as it grew longer, it was a darker blonde than the sun-bleached yellow of his youth, and no longer straight. He gained muscle and height and a broadness of his shoulders, but never bulk; the malnourished desert boy the Jedi accepted into their Order remained too skinny.

Obi-Wan, who was getting wartime thin but looked, at least, healthy at all times, never thought much about it. In the past ten years, Anakin was always inconsistent when it came to food. Unpredictable, said Master Windu. As though Anakin’s behaviour, if not his perception of the world, has ever been anything less than perfectly predictable. 

Predictably, he asks, “Is Ahsoka all right, do you think?” It comes out hardly louder than a murmur but still breaks too harshly into the silence between them.

“Your men will see that she’s safe,” Obi-Wan says, which is likely true, but also what he hopes, “and she’s already proved she’s far from helpless. You’ll be back to her by the sunrise.”

“I know,” Anakin says, and rubs his eye. “I’m just—worried, I guess.”

“That’s normal.”

“Right.”

The conversation ends. 

Together, Obi-Wan and Anakin stay awake through the storm-wrought night in a waterlogged trench. Mud excretes from the wall to ooze down Obi-Wan’s neck into his tunic. The trench stinks of sulfur and oversaturated greenery. There are places on Coruscant that smell of the former, but never the latter; he first came to know it on a mission he took with Master Qui-Gon when he was sixteen, to a swathe of wetlands on some nightmare of a Mid-Rim planet where they chased down a pirate crew transporting illegal arms to Kessel. They argued on that mission, he and Master Qui-Gon, though he can’t remember what sparked the fight or its topic. Presumably, Master Qui-Gon won. He almost always did.

Until eleven days ago, the memory of that—of his constant certainty that he was right in all things—didn’t bother Obi-Wan particularly. It does now. They argued rarely. They had no need. Master Qui-Gon was an _excellent_ master, the best, really, the sort who Obi-Wan aspired to be with his own padawan but never quite managed—

Well. Master Yoda wasn’t wrong, strictly speaking, when he implied it made little sense that Master Qui-Gon saw no need to inform a nine-year-old slave that he was free right when he gained his freedom, but nor was Master Mundi wrong when he asked how Obi-Wan remained unaware of Anakin’s misunderstanding for a full decade. What Obi-Wan can only assume is that his late master meant to explain the situation when the immediate crises passed, but Maul stole the opportunity. So entrenched was Obi-Wan, at twenty-five, in his grief by the time they returned to the Temple that he hadn’t noticed the warning signs, and when he finally overcame that grief, his and Anakin’s patterns of behaviour were normalised.

It’s made all the worse by the knowledge that for Obi-Wan, Anakin’s presence after Master Qui-Gon’s death was an unexpected gift. After returning from Naboo, Obi-Wan went from a padawan to having a padawan in a number of hours at his own insistence because, truthfully, mentoring the half-starved ex-slave boy with a stronger connection to the Force than the Jedi had seen in generations, if ever, was his master’s dying wish. But Anakin in the following weeks forced Obi-Wan to focus on something other than the swirling negativity that threatened to enshroud him—teaching the boy to read and write, how to swim, how to adjust to his new life, what it means to be a Jedi. At nine, his learning curve far surpassed his agemates and other padawans, and he was a quicker thinker than most adults, but though he was already nine, Obi-Wan had to take him through the steps of early childhood development.

Ten years later, they wait out the storm-wrought night together in a waterlogged trench. They’re generals in a war. Eight hours ago, Obi-Wan lost his lightsaber briefly in a scuffle and shot a battle droid in the head with its own blaster. Seven hours ago, Anakin walked through heavy fire as though it were no trouble at all, and took out the last AAT. Ahsoka nearly got herself shot watching him do it; Obi-Wan, who had seen him do it before, barely paused long enough to blink.

Seven hours later, his eyes stay closed too long between each next blink, the dense and saturated atmosphere exhausting him more successfully than any battle. To the west, somewhere in the distance, an animal keens. Wingbeats pulse through the air overhead, disturbing the mist, and a moment later, two red-throated purifiers land on the dead trooper’s chest.

Beneath the streaked mud, Anakin’s face pales to a startling white.

They have no verbal discussion before he glances sideways to Obi-Wan, who nods minutely. Though neither is precisely sure where they are, they scramble slowly, silently, through the groundwater until they round a bend, leaving the sight of the scavenger birds behind them. Nearby, a toad or something like one croaks, and the sharp snap of the trooper’s armour breaking echoes down the trench. Anakin covers his mouth with his hands; Obi-Wan shuts his eyes and focuses on breathing.

Once, when Obi-Wan was twenty-two, he and his master ventured to Ukio to investigate and resolve a strike among the burrmillet farmers. The dispute took days to resolve, but Master Qui-Gon calmed the protestors by the end, as he often did. On the first day, Obi-Wan befriended the leader’s three children, who recently inherited their neighbour’s loth-kit, a small, mewling thing with a black-spotted coat the same sallow tan as the local grain and a mouth of sharp teeth. On the final night, the kit chased a barnmouse under the milling equipment. In the morning, Obi-Wan and the eldest daughter discovered the corpse’s location by following the carrion birds. 

He never thought he’d have to witness what was done to a farm child’s pet done onto a sentient lifeform. This is not, he thinks, what Jedi life should be.

Maybe Anakin’s seen it before, all those years ago on Tatooine. Obi-Wan wouldn’t know, since his padawan spoke so sparingly of his earlier childhood after he realised it marked him as different. He talked about his mother, especially at first, and occasionally of a boy called Kitster, of designing droids he could rarely ever build and of the podraces, about his _transaction history_ because Obi-Wan saw the lash marks on his—

For the past ten years, Obi-Wan had known that Anakin was born into slavery with Gardulla the Hutt as his owner. He knew that Gardulla the Hutt was Jabba the Hutt’s sister. He knew both these facts, and hadn’t considered that perhaps the Council had misjudged the situation when they claimed Anakin’s “experience with the Hutts” would help smooth interactions after rescuing the son. He never considered that the interaction would end with a droid explaining the correct method of reactivating the bomb in a slave’s chip.

Anakin’s leg jumps, so their knees knock. “There were carrion birds on Tatooine,” he says lowly in answer to the thought Obi-Wan hadn’t voiced. A rattling wind disturbs more spores from the moss dangling from a knot of weeping trees, illuminating the space between them to reveal how dirtied the blaster wound is and reflect dully off the new gnarled scar tissue trailed over Anakin’s eye. “Woodoos. They’d come into Mos Espa at night to eat the dead scurriers, but they weren’t picky. Anything else dead was fair game too.”

When he doesn’t elaborate, Obi-Wan doesn’t ask about what else may have been dead in the streets of Mos Espa. “I,” he starts, before Anakin scrambles beneath the cage of protruding grey roots to lie flat on his back in the shallow water and clustering duckweed. Obi-Wan feels it just a second after he does, the approaching Separatist scout. 

The approach is from his side of the ditch. It’s a lone scout, undetectable without the Force for guidance. A moment after he shoves his body beneath the trench’s narrow lip and the transparent moss, a probe swims through the fog, just an imprint of a black shape and dimmed red light within the grey mist. It hesitates, bobbing above them, while the pain from the blaster wound whets in response to the pressure. He doesn’t move, but Anakin grips his lightsaber. Finally, the probe floats away, venturing deeper into the swamp.

Though they retreat from their cramped spaces, and Anakin moves to sit beside him rather than across, they don’t speak. There’s too much lurking out there in the dark to risk the comfort of conversation again. Probes and carrion birds. Fog and glowing spores. No, it’s certainly safer to maintain their silence.

Together, they wait out the storm-wrought night in the waterlogged trench. The night will be a long one, though Mimban’s rotation is three hours shorter than they’re used to on Coruscant. A twenty-four hour rotation—a standard day—is what Obi-Wan was raised knowing. Anakin needed to adapt to it. That first night in the Temple, when he expressed confusion over readying for bed before the thirtieth hour, Obi-Wan thought, _He_ is _too old._ He thought, _Master, how can I teach a boy who doesn’t know GST or CRC?_

Anakin learned both within days, as was his tendency. Other Jedi often thought him egotistical, full of bluster without the skill to back it, but general perfectionism was his way. He apologised too often and bent rules frequently, but never broke them. Miserably, Obi-Wan wonders, for the first time in at least nine years, if Anakin’s brand of perfectionism was due to a fear that should he be anything less, that Obi-Wan would send him back to Tatooine. _Or_ , says a small voice in a dusty, unwanted corner of his thoughts, _kill him_.

During the Council meeting, after Master Tiin asked how Obi-Wan could justify expending funds without warning in wartime, Master Plo Koon said, “He understands now that you haven’t reactivated the chip, yes?” as Master Ti said, “That any member of our Order could be allowed to feel this way must be addressed.” She said it, but no one listened. 

Twenty hours later, Obi-Wan and Anakin were on a starship travelling to Mimban. The campaign was wrong from the start. When Master Tik died yesterday evening, no one in the 212th or 501st was terribly shocked. They offered him aid. It was his choice to reject it.

This war is not yet a year old, but Obi-Wan is already acclimatised to it. Anakin and Ahsoka thrive in it. Few others protest, though the Order lost more Jedi in the past five months than they had in the past five years. Five Standard Galactic Months, that is, in five Standard Galactic Years. Never so consistently has Obi-Wan needed to track how many hours of sunlight to expect, how many hours in the dark. This close to Mimban’s equator, where the clouds rarely part and the rainless thunderstorm is nearly constant, the difference between night and day is almost negligible, but it matters for what lifeforms stalk the swamp seeking prey. Nine hours is the answer. They have approximately four left.

One raindrop then another lands on his hair. Mud slides over his forehead to catch in his eyelashes. Around the bend, the purifiers shriek their displeasure at the change in weather, and leave their feast. His wound burns when the hot rain strikes it, and when the drizzle lands on the trench’s puddle, it vibrates. Beside him, Anakin shifts as though he thinks he can escape the groundwater and coughs wetly.

There are limits to how much even a desert boy can enjoy water and the rain. For Obi-Wan, who never had to live without either, climates like this have always been torture.

Even if he isn’t coughing yet, there’s a weight on his lungs, a weight of pond scum growing down in the inferior lobes, that portends illness for the both of them by this time tomorrow. This is not how he expected today to end. It’s not how he wanted today to end. What he wants is for the day to break. He wants his cot in the camp, his temporary bunk on the _Resolute_ , his bed in the Temple. He wants to mediate there, alone. He wants proper tea and to tag along with Anakin when he introduces Ahsoka to Dex’s, because he wants proper food.

A Jedi shouldn’t want, but Obi-Wan’s list of banal desires could stretch for days. 

What he really wants, he thinks, is to travel through time—backwards, up the stream of it like the glimmerfish of Alderaan—to that day on Tatooine when he looked down at the little boy Master Qui-Gon dragged in his wake and called him dangerous. “You’re free, Ani,” he’d say instead, “and I’ll not let any harm come to you.”

The problem, of course, is that the claim that Anakin is dangerous is not wholly untrue. When he was ten, he took out a pirate’s crew with nothing more than pebbles and the Force; when Obi-Wan was ten, he was still reviewing kata and vocabulary notes. When Anakin was seventeen, he yanked a ship out of flight and thwarted a prisoner’s escape; at that age, a bad mission on Teth resulted in Master Qui-Gon saving Obi-Wan from a hostage situation. At thirty-five, experience provides him the skill he needed to lead men into battle, but a small part of him he ignored was always jealous and wary of Anakin’s carelessly natural ability in equal measure. That doesn’t help this situation. When Master Mundi asked how Obi-Wan wasn’t made aware of it earlier, he answered, “Because Anakin thought it was normal—it wasn’t as though he was going to ask for confirmation,” but now that same small part of him fears that perhaps he had been aware of it, and simply pretended not to see it. 

In the eleven days, they haven’t discussed what happened on Tatooine. Anakin hasn’t mentioned it, so Obi-Wan hasn’t mentioned it. More than likely, though, it’s not a conversation they can avoid forever. Not if Anakin insists on recklessly walking through open enemy fire. Just because he hasn’t been killed yet doesn’t mean he’ll avoid death forever. Master Tik should have taught him that.

Master Tik rejected help, and now he’s dead.

Master Tik’s Mud Jumpers followed them into the swamp, and four of them became food for the scavenger birds. They’re all dead, but Obi-Wan and Anakin are alive.

Alive but not well, they wait out the final three hours of the storm-wrought night in a waterlogged trench. The rain dislodges more glowing spores from the hanging moss, and somewhere in the distance, a native cat-owl screeches. Anakin rests his head against the mud wall and breathes unevenly, eyes closed, but awake. Obi-Wan struggles against his body’s need for rest, a need strengthened by the ceaseless dark. When they and Ahsoka arrived with their men eight days ago, Master Tik grinned at then sardonically from across a table in the poorly lit camp plastent, and told them, “Say goodbye to the sun. You won’t be seeing it again until you leave.” 

Apparently the members of the Republic fleet who grounded with him in case the campaign needed a planetary airstrike called Mimban the Void. Obi-Wan couldn’t blame them. That was something else he wanted: the sun.

The first time he confronted the truth that his padawan was different was six years ago on an almost month-long mission to the main Umbaran doonium mines. It was a diplomatic mission involving rising intergalactic taxation, and Anakin coped as badly with the lack of sunlight as he copes with high humidity. Their attempted departure failed when an airborne predator knocked them from the sky into a forest of Zabrak Spines, a thicket of thick black trunks rising towards an equally black sky, their spiked branches radiating a bioluminescent red that left Obi-Wan with unnecessary nightmares for weeks. Neither of them could locate their lightsabers in enough time before the Spines attacked. When his padawan levelled a perfect circle around them that stretched on further than was needed, he didn’t know how to react, so he didn’t react much at all. He told no one.

Ten days ago, during the Council meeting, Obi-Wan only told more or less the truth, because he neglected to mention that Anakin called up a sandstorm with nothing but his panic. The Council’s reaction was unexpectedly callous to the rest of it. If they heard what he managed with the Force based on emotion, then Master Windu—

“I can feel you thinking,” Anakin says in the mumble. He doesn’t move, nor open his eyes, even when the screech of the cat-owl winds out again from somewhere deeper in the trees.

Obi-Wan adjusts himself, sloshing rank earth and stale water over his legs. The ensuing pain is acute, but he ignores it, as he ignores many things life has to offer. “There’s not much else to do,” he says. They shouldn’t be speaking, but _not_ speaking is undeniably worse.

As the drizzle evolves into a light rain, Anakin asks, “Why Umbara?”

“I don’t think we’ve gone so long without the sun since.” Despite Obi-Wan’s best efforts to shield the bond, to avoid advertising what happened in the Council meeting, his ambling thoughts must be leaking impressions. It’s unfair, really. He isn’t receiving anything in return. Usually, it’s the reverse, since he had to perfect his shields the moment he accepted Anakin as his pupil. Given his presence in the Force, it’s no surprise that standing next to the boy, unshielded on both ends, is comparable to standing beside a star.

His eyes slit open as thunder crashes overhead, perfectly in time with a lightning strike. “Great,” he says, scowling. “How much longer?”

Checking his chronometer, Obi-Wan answers, “Three hours.”

“Three hours,” Anakin repeats, staring resignedly at the roots across from them. “ _Great_. How’s the leg?”

“Nothing bacta and some cleaning won’t fix.”

“Good.” He coughs, though it’s more of a hack. “Ahsoka’s worried,” he adds, saying it with the expected surety of a master with a training bond. 

“That’s natural.”

“Right.”

This isn’t Tatooine; there will be no false dawn to allow them earlier time to leave. Obi-Wan says, “You do know that I’ve not and have no intention to reactivate the chip, don’t you?” because abruptly, he remembers that when he _didn’t_ react on Umbara, his padawan’s stuttered out apologies for the ship’s crash lasted hours.

Anakin picks at a fraying thread in his trousers, but answers without hesitation, “Yeah, I know. I know I should’ve known—”

“It’s not your fault,” Obi-Wan says, and folds his arms. “I want to be clear, though. You are not anyone’s property. Officially, you’ve been a citizen of the Republic since you arrived in Coruscant. The chip was deactivated before you left Tatooine. Do you have any questions?”

“Is there a way to remove it? The chip.”

“Unfortunately, no,” Obi-Wan answers, and explains what the healer explained to him about how Anakin’s body grew around it, so removal meant paralysis at best, death at worst.

Frowning, the boy says, “Fucking Gardulla,” but doesn’t push the matter. Filtering weakly through their mutually shielded bond are his long-standing, idly murderous intentions. 

Rather joylessly, Obi-Wan thinks that Gardulla the Hutt’s murder isn’t one he’d caution against. Having access to detonators could, arguably, be considered _armed_ , and the world would be a more wholesome place without her.

It’s the war that’s doing this to him. Clearly, he’s spent too long in the mud, in the snow, in the sand, in broken city streets surrounded by dead troopers. Before the war, a thought like that never would have crossed his mind, but before the war, he also didn’t know a thought like that would ever be relevant. This is not meant to be a Jedi’s life, he thinks. Jedi aren’t meant to lead men to their deaths in battle, and Jedi aren’t meant to spend ten years thinking one mistake will see them killed.

Anakin’s eyes slide shut, but snap open when the light rain undergoes its second evolution, shifting without warning into a deluge. They rush out from their exposed side of the trench to huddle beneath the roots, crammed close together but marginally protected. Two hours, Obi-Wan tells himself as they shiver despite the overwhelming heat. Just two hours and then they can head back to camp. Though it won’t be a pleasant walk, at least they’ll be moving.

Far too close for comfort, a prey animal cries and its predator howls. Above them, the roots rasp. Under his breath, Anakin curses. The nerves around Obi-Wan’s blaster wound zing with sharp pain. 

When he was young, before Master Qui-Gon rejected then accepted him as his padawan, Obi-Wan learned to meditate through pain. To ignore it. Fight through it, until the time came where he could handle its cause. It was part of his curriculum as a youngling, as it was for all younglings. How old was he? Eight? Young enough that it was a lesson he needed to teach Anakin himself. Back then, what the Jedi instructors failed to tell their youngling pupils, though, was that after an injury, the opportunity to meditate almost never arose. This is also unfortunate; there are few activities in life that Obi-Wan enjoys as much as meditation.

By contrast, there are few activities in life Anakin abhors as much as meditation. 

The drifting spores illuminate a winged spider with a bulbous brown body and threads for legs weaving a web around the outer roots furthest from Obi-Wan’s right. Just last year, he learned Stewjon has no spiders, which cannot be considered a planetary failing. Even as he wonders if Tatooine has any, Anakin’s already saying, “The smallest spiders are the deadliest, but you usually can’t see them. But the largest? Picture something eight-legged, hairy, and the size of Master Yoda.” 

Obi-Wan shudders. “Were they a common sight?” 

“Not in Mos Espa,” Anakin answers, “but they’re in the Dune Sea.”

This, at least, is fortunate: that Obi-Wan remained blissfully unaware of what lurked in the sand until after he left the planet. “Don’t laugh,” he says crossly, feeling Anakin’s amusement at his _Coruscanti mentality_ echoing through the bond. Their shields have weakened throughout the night, sheer exhaustion chipping away at the polite privacy they usually afford each other when in close proximity off the battlefield. “Need I remind you that you called the scalefish on Naboo unnatural?”

“I was nine,” he says, offended. “I’d never seen a fish in my life. You’re not the only one to find it funny—Padmé brought it up before we even landed.”

He says _Padmé_ with an inadvisable amount of fondness. Though she’s just another aspect in his life that they should discuss, Obi-Wan can’t bring himself to broach the subject. What he doesn’t see he doesn’t need to acknowledge. This way, he isn’t lying to the Council through omission about more than Anakin’s spotty emotional control.

A night-time songbird swoops from the weeping tree’s upper branches to gobble the spider out from its web with an audible crunch. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget the natural world is vicious and uncaring on its own, without sentient lifeform intervention. Obi-Wan looks away, glancing at Anakin, whose eyes are shut again, as though in deep concentration, or in pain. Ahsoka must be worrying herself sick about his absence. The girl is only fourteen, after all. An ordinary age for a padawan, maybe, but fourteen is far too young for a war.

And nineteen is far too young to _lead_ in a war.

Obi-Wan, at thirty-five, is one of the younger generals, and certainly younger than any member of the Council, but compared to Anakin and Ahsoka, he feels ancient. Perhaps Master Qui-Gon had felt this way, too. Maybe all masters do once their first padawan reaches their knighting. It was meant as a rite of passage on both ends. After the events on Tatooine, Obi-Wan suspects that he failed that rite long before it came to fruition.

Again, Anakin says, “I can feel you thinking,” and jolts Obi-Wan from his musings.

“I’m considering the brutality of the natural world,” he says as he checks his chronometer. “Shouldn’t be long until daybreak.”

Anakin hums. 

Gradually, the downpour slows to a shower, and finally, returns to undisturbed mist. Another Separatist probe passes overhead, but they stay undetected. The burning in Obi-Wan’s leg dulls to a pinched ache and Anakin’s breathing is more ragged than ever. As the sky edges from green-black to grey-green, the boy suddenly says, “Did everyone know?”

When Obi-Wan turns, he finds Anakin watching him directly, intensely, his mouth set in a line and brows drawn. “Yes,” Obi-Wan says, uncertain. “Well, mostly, I suppose. Many people don’t know about your past, so they never would have any assumptions about you. Is this about Padmé?”

With a visible flinch, Anakin says, “No,” but he doesn’t explain, so it’s likely he’s lying. 

Obi-Wan sighs. “She argued at the time that you would be made a resident of Naboo,” he says, running a hand through his mud-slicked hair, “and therefore a Republic citizen should the Council reject you. Given what you did for Naboo, it was your right. When you moved to Coruscant, I filed your immigration papers. Legally, I was your guardian. The Chancellor—”

“The Chancellor?”

“Yes,” he says, weary. “He had the papers notarized and your citizenship approved within the week. In thanks for your services to Naboo.”

Anakin says, “Right,” and, “We should go,” then slides from the roots into groundwater.

Together, they crawl out from the waterlogged trench into the storm-wrought dawn. There’s so much more that Obi-Wan should say, should ask, but as they sneak back into the swamp, he holds his tongue and settles with saying nothing at all.


End file.
